Breast-milk banks latch on to social media

Shortage of human milk banks prompts moms to seek donors on Facebook

Jacqueline Brady’s 5-week-old daughter Chayse, left, has trouble latching. When her need for breast milk was posted on a new Facebook group, she found Brenda Coulter, mother of 3-month-old Chloe.

By:Andrea Gordonbreast-milk, Published on Mon Nov 29 2010

Jacqueline Brady breastfed her first three children without a hitch. So after her daughter Chayse was born five weeks ago, the Barrie mother knew right away there was a problem. The baby struggled to latch on and wasn’t getting enough milk. Brady began pumping to feed her by bottle, but her milk supply declined.

After a week, the baby had lost too much weight. When Brady reluctantly supplemented with formula, Chayse became fussy and constipated.

Then last week, the worried mother heard about Eats on Feets, a new breast-milk sharing network on Facebook that links moms willing to donate milk with those who need it.

A request was posted on the group’s southwestern Ontario page on Monday. Within a day, six women had offered to donate, including Brenda Coulter, a nursing mom who happens to live a block away from Brady.

She soon arrived with four ounces of fresh milk and enough frozen bags to last at least a week. She also came willing to disclose medical history and lifestyle details and, if requested, have her blood screened.

“It’s definitely a very good feeling that a complete stranger would go out of their way like that to help,” says Brady, 28.

After her first few feedings, Chayse was sleeping better, fussing less and was no longer constipated, says her mother.

Informal milk sharing and “wet nurses” have been around since the dawn of time, though these days the practice is largely underground. Eats on Feets, however, has brought the hidden network into social media and extended its reach, fuelling interest, controversy and warnings from health authorities.

Last week, Health Canada warned mothers not to use obtained through the Internet or directly from other women because of risks of transmitting viruses, such as HIV, or bacteria. “Unprocessed milk should not be shared,” it said in a news release. The Canadian Pediatric Society also does not support informal milk sharing.

But for mothers like Brady, who want their babies to receive the valuable nutrients and antibodies that human milk provides, there are few choices.

There is only one milk bank in Canada, at the B.C. Women’s Hospital and Health Centre in Vancouver, which primarily serves sick and premature babies. In the early 1980s there were 23 milk banks, which screened donors for infectious diseases and pasteurized the milk to safeguard against bacteria before freezing and shipping. Most shut down later that decade amid fears of HIV transmission.

The B.C. bank cannot even meet the demand of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, the one other hospital in Canada that offers donor milk to premature infants. Sunnybrook has to get its supply from the U.S.

There are other reasons for the growing demand for donor . While physicians urge mothers to breastfeed exclusively for six months, and then continue to age 2 or beyond, there is little support for the many women who have difficulties, notes longtime advocate Dr. Jack Newman.

As a result, many give up. A Toronto Public Health survey this year found that while almost all mothers start in hospital, only 63 per cent are exclusively nursing by the time they are discharged. Two weeks later, that’s down to barely more than half.

Still, Newman doesn’t support woman-to-woman sharing, even though he says the risk of disease transmission is small. “I’m worried about it. I think this should not be done on an informal basis,” says the founder of the Newman Breastfeeding Clinic and Institute in Toronto. “This is why it’s so important to have a system of breast-milk banks.”

Earlier this month, the Canadian Pediatric Society also called for more milk banks, noting that human milk is critical for premature and sick babies. Those babies are more vulnerable to dangerous intestinal infections, and provides important immunities.

Unger is spearheading an initiative to set up a Toronto milk bank, but says it’s still a few years away — pending more research and funding — and will initially make sick babies its priority.

Even if parents could access from banks in Vancouver or the U.S., costs can be prohibitive. Most are non-profit and donors are not paid, but the banks have to cover the costs of screening, pasteurizing, freezing and shipping, and that can translate to a cost of up to $100 a day for mothers needing milk. In most cases, breastfeeding mothers can only donate milk if they have a minimum of 100 ounces to deliver.

“I don’t have 20 years to wait. I see sickly babies all over North America who need ,” says Emma Kwasnica, who founded the global Eats on Feets group three weeks ago.

The Montreal mother of three got the idea from a group set up by an Arizona midwife. The grassroots network has grown to more than 100 chapters with Facebook pages in 26 countries, and has resulted in 70 matches — including two in Ontario. It does not get involved with arrangements between mothers, but provides the online space to find each other. It also offers links to public health information on and disease transmission, a suggested list of questions for donors and recipients, details about screening, and demonstrations on how parents can flash-pasteurize donor milk on the stovetop.

“This outpouring of support from women has been fantastic,” says Kwasnica. “We’re not suggesting women pick up bags of milk from women they’ve never spoken to and know nothing about. It’s up to women themselves to make informed choices, and now all the information is there at their fingertips.”

She notes that the World Health Organization recommends the best choice for babies who can’t get from their own mothers is human milk from another source.

Instead of issuing warnings, says Kwasnica, Health Canada should focus on giving mothers information on how to share milk safely. “Women are going to share their milk anyway. They’re doing it. It’s not underground any more.”

Lee Anne King Matchett of Oshawa was one of them. Matchett, 37, has a glandular condition that meant she couldn’t produce enough milk to feed her two daughters. Sophia, 9, nursed and was fed formula for her first year. But when Grace was born two years ago, Matchett had another plan in place: She had searched out and interviewed a group of willing donors.

For the first year of her life, Grace was nourished on donated by at least 10 “milk mothers” from around the GTA and as far away as Niagara Falls, and picked up in her father’s car.

“I wouldn’t have done it any other way,” says her mom, who became friends with all of them. “The response was overwhelming. We sometimes had three donors at once pumping for Grace. I felt so lucky.”

There were so many offers that she only used formula a couple of times. Grace is now a happy, thriving 2-year-old who has barely even had a cold.

All Matchett’s donors, who were nursing their own babies, went to their physicians and had their blood screened, though she didn’t wait for the results before using their milk. She chose not to pasteurize because the process breaks down some of the nutrients in .

“It’s a risk, but I made that choice.”

In Barrie, Brady and Coulter concede their decision to share makes some people queasy. It also carries risks, but they consider them worth taking.

“(Coulter) is currently breastfeeding a beautiful, healthy little girl,” says Brady, who donated her own milk to a close friend nine years ago. “That was the deciding factor for us.”

She didn’t produce enough milk for her eldest, now 2, and ended up supplementing with formula. Helping out another mom in a similar situation made perfect sense. “Sometimes we just have to stick together, despite the critics or the controversy it might cause.”

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